Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor

Henry was born on November 11, 1050, at the imperial palace of Goslar in Saxony, the eldest son of Emperor Henry III and Agnes of Poitou ^[1]. His father, a forceful ruler of the Salian dynasty, had the boy elected German king at Tribur in 1053 and crowned at Aachen the following year, securing the succession while Henry was still a toddler ^[2].

That careful planning collapsed when Henry III died suddenly in October 1056. The new king was five years old, and his mother Agnes assumed the regency. Contemporary chroniclers judged her government weak: she bought support by granting away duchies, handing Bavaria to Otto of Nordheim and Swabia to Rudolf of Rheinfelden, decisions that later returned to haunt her son ^[1][3].

In April 1062 Archbishop Anno of Cologne staged a coup remembered as the kidnapping of Kaiserswerth. Anno lured the eleven year old king onto a boat on the Rhine and carried him off, seizing control of the government and the royal insignia. Henry reportedly leapt into the river to escape and was pulled back aboard. Control of the young king passed between Anno and Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen over the next years, an experience that left Henry deeply suspicious of the great princes of the realm ^[2][3].

Henry came of age in March 1065, girded with the sword of knighthood at Worms, and began governing in his own right around 1066 after Adalbert's fall from favor ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor before his clash with Rome finds a young king determined to rebuild royal power where it had eroded during the regency, above all in Saxony.

He pursued a policy of recovering crown lands in the Harz mountain region, building castles such as the Harzburg and garrisoning them with ministeriales, unfree knights who served the king directly. Saxon nobles and free peasants saw the castles as instruments of oppression. In 1073 a broad Saxon rising forced Henry to flee the Harzburg by night. After a humiliating settlement, rebels sacked the castle and desecrated the burial site of his family, an outrage that swung opinion back toward the king ^[3][4].

On June 9, 1075, Henry crushed the Saxon army at the Battle of Homburg on the Unstrut river. The victory seemed to restore royal authority in Germany, and the Saxon leaders submitted that autumn. At precisely this moment of strength, however, a far more dangerous conflict was opening with the reformed papacy in Rome ^[2][4].

Pope Gregory VII, elected in 1073, was the driving spirit of a reform movement that condemned simony and demanded that laymen, including kings, stop investing bishops with the ring and staff of their office ^[5]. For the German monarchy this was an existential question: bishops administered vast royal lands, and the crown depended on choosing loyal men. When Henry installed his own candidate as archbishop of Milan in 1075, Gregory threatened him with excommunication ^[1][5].

Henry answered in January 1076 by assembling German bishops at Worms, where they renounced obedience to Gregory. A letter sent in the king's name addressed the pope as Hildebrand, false monk, and demanded that he descend from the papal throne ^[2]. Gregory's response was without precedent. In February 1076 he excommunicated Henry and declared his subjects released from their oaths of loyalty. German princes, many of them old enemies of the king, seized the opening and announced that unless Henry obtained absolution within a year they would elect another ruler ^[1][5].

What followed became one of the most famous scenes of the Middle Ages. In the winter of 1076 to 1077, Henry crossed the Alps with a small party and appeared before the castle of Canossa in the Apennines, where Gregory was staying as the guest of Countess Matilda of Tuscany. According to Gregory's own letter to the German princes, the king stood before the gate for three days as a barefoot penitent in a woolen shirt before the pope absolved him on January 28, 1077 ^[5][6]. Canossa was a spiritual humiliation but also a political maneuver: absolution cut the legal ground from under the princes' planned deposition. The German opposition elected Rudolf of Rheinfelden as anti king anyway in March 1077, and civil war engulfed the kingdom ^[1][4].

The war with Rudolf dragged on for three years. Gregory excommunicated Henry a second time in March 1080 and recognized Rudolf as king, but this time the sentence found far less support in Germany. Henry's party gathered bishops at Brixen in June 1080 and declared Gregory deposed, naming Archbishop Wibert of Ravenna as Pope Clement III ^[1][5]. In October 1080 Rudolf died of wounds received at the Battle of the Elster, losing his right hand in the fighting, a mutilation contemporaries read as divine judgment on a broken oath ^[3][4].

Freed in Germany, Henry marched on Italy. He besieged Rome in successive campaigns, and in March 1084 his forces entered the city. Wibert was enthroned as Clement III, and on March 31, 1084, Easter Day, the antipope crowned Henry Holy Roman Emperor in St. Peter's ^[1][2]. Gregory, holed up in the Castel Sant'Angelo, was rescued by his Norman ally Robert Guiscard, whose troops sacked Rome so brutally that the pope could not remain. Gregory died in exile at Salerno in May 1085 ^[5][6].

The imperial coronation was the high point of Henry's fortunes, yet the struggle did not end. Gregory's successors, above all Urban II, continued the reform program and kept Henry under the ban. A renewed Italian expedition in the early 1090s stalled against the alliance of Matilda of Tuscany and the Welf dynasty, and for several years the emperor was effectively trapped in northern Italy ^[1][4].

Henry married Bertha of Savoy in 1066, a match arranged in childhood. In 1069 he attempted to divorce her, but the papal legate Peter Damian blocked the plan and the marriage endured. Bertha shared the winter crossing of the Alps to Canossa with their infant son and bore Henry several children, including the future kings Conrad and Henry V, before her death in 1287 by some errors of transmission, correctly in December 1087 ^[1][3].

In 1089 the widowed emperor married Eupraxia of Kiev, daughter of Grand Prince Vsevolod I, who took the name Adelaide in the West. The marriage collapsed within a few years. Eupraxia fled to Henry's enemies and in 1094 and 1095 publicly accused him before church councils of grave abuse, charges his opponents circulated widely and his supporters rejected as slander. Historians treat the accusations with caution, but the scandal damaged Henry badly during the years of his Italian entrapment ^[4][6].

Henry was also a writer of a kind rare among medieval monarchs: a series of letters composed in his name survives, including the defiant letter to Gregory VII of 1076 and later appeals to his son and to King Philip I of France, documents that scholars use to trace the ideology of the Salian court ^[2][6].

Family became the instrument of Henry's final defeats. His eldest son Conrad, crowned German king in 1087, defected to the papal camp in 1093 and was crowned king of Italy with the support of Matilda of Tuscany. Henry disinherited him in 1098 and had his second son, the younger Henry, elected king in his place after extracting an oath that the boy would never act against his father during his lifetime ^[1][4].

The oath did not hold. In December 1104 the young Henry deserted his father, presenting himself as the champion of the church party and of princes weary of the old emperor's rule. Late in 1105 he lured his father into negotiations, took him into custody, and at Böckelheim castle and then at an assembly in Ingelheim in December 1105 forced him to surrender the imperial insignia and abdicate ^[1][3].

The old emperor escaped custody early in 1106 and fled down the Rhine to Liège, where the local bishop and lords of Lotharingia still supported him. He was organizing resistance and had defeated an advance force of his son's army when he fell ill. Henry IV died at Liège on August 7, 1106, at the age of fifty five ^[1][2]. Because he died excommunicate, his body was denied consecrated burial for five years; it rested in an unconsecrated chapel at Speyer until the ban was lifted, and only in 1111 was he finally interred in the family vault in Speyer Cathedral ^[3][4].

Any Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor biography turns on Canossa, and the scene has lived many afterlives. In the nineteenth century Otto von Bismarck, in conflict with the Catholic Church, declared in the Reichstag in 1872 that Germany would not go to Canossa, turning the castle into a lasting metaphor for capitulation to Rome ^[4][6]. For medieval contemporaries the meaning was already disputed: papal writers saw a sinner humbled, imperial writers a king who outwitted his judge.

Measured as a list of Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor achievements, the record is mixed. He preserved the Salian monarchy through decades of civil war, defeated two anti kings (Rudolf of Rheinfelden and the short lived Hermann of Salm), won the imperial crown, and issued early territorial peace ordinances, including the imperial peace of Mainz in 1103, that pointed toward later public peace legislation in Germany ^[1][3]. Yet he could not defeat the reform papacy. The controversy he fought was settled only after his death, when Henry V and Pope Calixtus II agreed to the Concordat of Worms in 1122, a compromise separating the spiritual and temporal elements of a bishop's office ^[5].

Among ordinary people Henry retained surprising affection. Chroniclers noted that the poor of Liège and Speyer mourned him as a protector, and burghers of the Rhine towns had been among his steadiest allies against the princes ^[3][4]. Modern historians, working from the letters, the anonymous Vita Heinrici IV, and the hostile Saxon chronicles, present him neither as tyrant nor as martyr but as a tenacious ruler caught in a structural transformation of European order. Among Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor facts, one endures above the rest: after Canossa, no Western ruler could again claim untroubled command over the church in his lands ^[5][6].